Facebook Working On An App Which Will Send Breaking News To The Public

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

Facebook is working on a new stand-alone mobile news app which appears to be part of their ‘Facebook for business’ initiative. The app is still currently in the early stages of development however according to insider reports, it will ask users to choose from a number of publications that they want to receive notifications from and specific topics they want to receive notifications about.

When news from a preselected topic breaks, a notification of up to 100 characters will be sent to the user. The notification will link to the publications website which is interesting considering how hell bent Facebook are about trying to get us to use their website for anything.

One would have thought that the notification may have linked to publication content inside the Facebook website, however it appears you will be taken to the original content itself which is nice, and the way it should be.

Social media is growing as a news source, especially when it comes to breaking news. Twitter has had a firm grip on this part of the market, there is no doubt that tweeting breaking news is the fastest way of getting it out there at the moment. Now Facebook wants in on the action.

It makes sense for them to try and capitalise on breaking news content, however it sounds as if this app is no more than a funnel for publishers to push content through and while Facebook are only entering the action now, Twitter are getting ready to up their game.

Just last week Twitter began testing a breaking news tab in Android and iOS and soon it will release Project Lightning which is going to help them to provide coverage for live content on Twitter.

The Facebook app is still reportedly in the Alpha stages of testing so there is no word on when it will be released at the moment.